Commonplace book

orig. A book in which ‘commonplaces’ or passages important for reference were collected, usually under general heads; hence, a book in which one records passages or matters to be especially remembered or referred to, with or without arrangement.1578 COOPERThesaurus A studious yong man ... may gather to himselfe good furniture both of words and approved phrases ... and to make to his use as it were a common place booke. 1642 FULLERHoly & Prof. St. A Common-place-book contains many notions in garrison, whence the owner may draw out an army into the field.

Subscribe To

Wednesday, April 24, 2013

So ends another semester, and the losing effort to teach books outside a literary vacuum. “I don't need a library to do what I do,” Stanley Fish told Jerome McGann, showing him around the Johns Hopkins campus. All of my students are Stanley Fish. There are no libraries behind their study of literature. Seven decades after John Crowe Ransom named the movement, the New Critics have achieved what they were after. “[T]hough one may consider a poem as an instance of historical and ethical documentation,” Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren had said in Understanding Poetry, “the poem in itself, if literature is to be studied as literature, remains finally the object of study.” The syllabus of nearly every English course is little more than a series of discrete texts which can’t be read historically because no one has any literary history. English departments might as well be renamed departments of close reading, because that is all they do—all that is possible for them to do.

Few understand that the doctrine of close reading emerges out of a logical paradox. Prior to a close reading of a literary text, the New Critics asked, how can you possibly know anything of its subject-matter? Only a close reading of it will establish what background knowledge, if any, is relevant. And if you supply the background in advance for students who are coming to the text for the first time, you rob their reading experience of its innocence and predetermine its outcome. For seven decades now, the object of study in literature classrooms has contracted to the text-in-itself. Even deconstructive critics (and those they have influenced) are primarily concerned with a text’s internal self-contradictions.

It’s not merely that undergraduates arrive at American universities notoriously ignorant of their cultural heritage—in my freshman honors seminar this term, only three students had ever heard of William Faulkner and none had read him—but also that no other conception of literature, if it is to be studied as literature, has any standing. William James believed that “You can give humanistic value to almost anything by teaching it historically.” By teaching it without its history, have the English departments nullified the humanistic value of literature?

There is an amusing passage in Philip Roth’s novel The Human Stain (2000), the last book I taught this semester. Delphine Roux, the young French professor who does everything in her power to destroy the novel’s protagonist, is trying to write a personals ad for the New York Review of Books. Most of the academics she knows—the “diapers,” as she secretly calls the male feminists, and the “hats,” the pretentious creative writers—repel her. Even the young theorists like herself, dripping with French sophistication and dressed from head to toe in black, are oddly unacceptable—“for despite her publications and a growing scholarly reputation, it was always difficult for her to deal with literature through literary theory. There could be such a gigantic gap between what she liked and what she was supposed to admire—between how she was supposed to speak about what she was supposed to admire and how she spoke to herself about the writers she treasured”—and she cannot tolerate the academic men for whom theory seems to roll off the tongue like a well-practiced speech.

Then there are “the older types, who are uncool and tweedy, ‘The Humanists’ ”:

Well, obliging as she must be at conferences and in publications to write and speak as the profession requires, the humanist is the very part of her own self that she sometimes feeels herself betraying, and so she is attracted to them: because they are what they are and always have been and because she knows they think of her as a traitor. . . . These older men, the Humanists, the old-fashioned traditionalist humanists who have read everything, the born-again teachers (as she thinks of them), make her sometimes feel shallow. . . . At faculty meetings they’re not afraid to say what they say, and you would think they should be; in class they’re not afraid to say what they feel, and, again, you would think they should be; and, as a result, in front of them she crumbles. Since she doesn’t herself have that much conviction about all the so-called discourse she picked up in Paris and New Haven, inwardly she crumbles. Only she needs that language to succeed.Whether literature needs the language is a question she doesn’t ask herself. I don’t have a quick-and-easy reform to propose. The earliest students of English, when the first departments were founded in the nineteenth century, complained that they were tired of lectures about literature: they wanted to read the literature itself. I suspect that my undergraduate students would be happy to sit through a series of lectures about literature—just as long as they didn’t have to read any of it!

There is another paradox involved in the study of literature, which the New Critics did not fully appreciate. The secret to understanding literature—any literature—is wide reading and long experience, which leaves the beginner practically worthless as a critic. Yet the only method for understanding literature is to read it as a critc—closely, that is, without any preconceptions. Perhaps the only exit from this paradox is to read literary history, which almost no one does anymore. Which is a tragedy and a surprise, since we live in a happy era for literary history—if Philip F. Gura’s provocative and manageable new history of the early American novel, Truth’s Ragged Edge (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), is any indication. Yesterday on Twitter, the critic Michael Schaub (a former student of mine) asked where to start in reading literary history. Here’s a short syllabus:

• E. R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. The title is deceptive: this is the study of how literature began, and where most of the literary concepts still in use derive from. A monument of German scholarship.

• J. V. Cunningham, Collected Essays. Criminally out of print, but in classic essays like “Ripeness Is All,” “Logic and Lyric,” and “Plots and Errors,” Cunningham demonstrates that literature is incapable of being understood without the historical sense.

• C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century. Lewis despised writing this volume in the Oxford History of English Literature, but the result is a model of how a comprehensive history of a literary period should be written.

• W. K. Wimsatt and Cleanth Brooks, Literary Criticism: A Short History. The “standard” work is Rene Wellek’s History of Modern Criticism in six volumes, although (as someone who was originally trained in the field) the title I most admire is Bernard Weinberg’s two-volume History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance. If pressed, I would reply that my own Elephants Teach is a contribution to the history of criticism.

• Leslie Stephen, English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (2 vols.). Originally published in 1876, it still holds up remarkably well. The very sparseness of schoarly apparatus, the appeal to a common reader, makes it a good example of the kind.

• Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism (3 vols.). I’ve been called a red-baiter for even mentioning the title, but Kolakowski’s is an exhaustive study of every branch and twig of Marxism, displaying great disinterested scholarship and insistently clear prose. (Maybe those are what the reds object to?) Really intellectual history instead of literary history, but this is how the encyclopaedic study of a subliterature is done.

There are many more, and every scholar has his personal favorites—ten more titles will occur to me the moment I hit the Publish button—and then there are the titles that don’t fit anywhere, like Clive James’s quirky and judgmental Cultural Amnesia, which is a history of twentieth-century literature in several langauges without offering itself in those terms. It is, at all events, a truth rarely acknowledged that there have been great books written in literary history, although they have attracted few readers—even among serious students of literature, who might begin to fill their own “gigantic gaps” by studying them.
____________

8
comments:

I just read Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch's lectures on writing, delivered in the University of Cambridge, 1913–1914. There was a guy who knew that to understand a text, you had to understand something of the society that produced it, and you had to understand that literature was part of the history of thought, not a series of disconnected artifacts created over time.

Maybe the New Criticism came about because people wanted to read books but didn't want to study history and sociology? Wasn't there a movement to turn Literature into a hard science with discrete formulas and a periodic chart. Burn a passage of Portis over a Bunsen burner and see what colors it gives off, then compare that to a chart, etc? I imagine that this sort of teaching takes less preparation, because you don't need to know much about anything but the text in hand, and you don't need to know anything about the text in hand. I oversimplify, I'm sure.

This is all a long-winded way of asking if literary history has gone by the wayside because people who want to teach literature don't want to study history or any literature aside from their favorite texts. It's easier, people are lazy, etc.

It seems to me the change is due to the shift away from Classical studies - the "furniture" of which is at once literary, historical, political, etc. It may be because I am now reading Gadamer's Truth and Method and under it's sway, but it also seems like Kantian thought could also be used to explain the reduced expectations and role of art. But I can't yet finish that thought... I consider this topic/question a lot on my blog and I really appreciated seeing it come up here because one is wont to feel rather the lone laudator temporis acti at times - loved the reference to tweed coats! For what it's worth, I've started assigning Flannery O'Connor's "Total Effect" in class, with satisfactory results.

Let me offer two points: (1) students coming into universities may not know about Faulkner or other canonical authors, but they almost always have experienced more contemporary writers offered to them by high school teachers eager to remain politically correct by avoiding the DWM (dead white man) reading lists; (2) a teacher in grad school told me that once I had gotten beyond my New Critic roots, and once I had immersed myself in literary theory, I would probably never again enjoy a book in the same way.

So, here are my questions: (1) what do you think of my first observation; and (2) do you not think that "advanced" readers--as suggested by my prof in grad school--tend to lose their innocence and--here is a dangerous phrase--their reading pleasures?

With your semester at an end, will you be teaching during the summer (like me), or are you holding out until the fall semester to go once more into the breach?

R.T. What's with the sneer in high school teachers "eager to remain politically correct"? A little grad school snobbery? How about well-educated, thoughtful high school teachers who want to provide students with a broader point of view and more varied exposure to voice than they'll receive from the DWM cohort? Most teachers do a pretty good job of mixing the canon with, as you say, contemporary voices. A bit less condescension, please!

D. G. Myers

A critic and literary historian for nearly a quarter of a century at Texas A&M and Ohio State universities, I am the author of The Elephants Teach and ex-fiction critic for Commentary. I have also written for Jewish Ideas Daily, the New York Times Book Review, the Weekly Standard, Philosophy and Literature, the Sewanee Review, First Things, the Daily Beast, the Barnes & Noble Review, the Journal of the History of Ideas, American Literary History, and other journals. Here is the Commonplace Blog’s statement of principles, such as they are.